Today, Kazakh is written in Cyrillic in Kazakhstan and Mongolia, while more than one million Kazakh-speakers in China use an Arabic-derived alphabet similar to that used to write Uyghur.

The oldest known written records of languages closely related to Kazakh were written in the Orkhon script. However, it is not believed that any of these varieties were direct predecessors of Kazakh. Modern Kazakh has historically been written using versions of the Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic scripts.

In October 2006, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the President of Kazakhstan, brought up the topic of using the Latin alphabet instead of the Cyrillic alphabet as the official script for Kazakh in Kazakhstan.[3][4] A Kazakh government study released in September 2007 said that Kazakhstan could feasibly switch to a Latin script over a 10- to 12-year period, for a cost of $300 million.[5] On December 13, 2007, however, President Nazarbayev announced a decision not to advance the transformation to a Latin alphabet: “For 70 years the Kazakhstanis read and wrote in Cyrillic. More than 100 nationalities live in our state. Thus we need stability and peace. We should be in no hurry in the issue of alphabet transformation”.[6]

Kazak exhibits tongue-rootvowel harmony, with some words of recent foreign origin (usually of Russian or Arabic origin) as exceptions. There is also a system of rounding harmony which resembles that of Kyrgyz, but which does not apply as strongly and is not reflected in the orthography.

The following chart depicts the consonant inventory of standard Kazakh;[7] many of the sounds, however, are allophones of other sounds or appear only in recent loan-words. The 18 consonant phonemes listed by Vajda are in bold—since these are phonemes, their listed place and manner of articulation are very general, and will vary from what is shown. The borrowed phonemes /f/, /v/, /ɕ/, /t͡ɕ/ and /x/, only occur in recent mostly Russian borrowings, and are shown in parentheses ( ) in the table below.

In the table, the elements left of a divide are voiceless, while those to the right are voiced.

Kazakh has a system of nine phonemic vowels, three of which are diphthongs. The rounding contrast and /æ/ generally only occur as phonemes in the first syllable of a word, but do occur later allophonically; see the section on harmony below for more information.

Kazakh is generally verb-final, though various permutations on SOV (subject–object–verb) word order can be used.[8] Verbal and nominal morphology in Kazakh exists almost exclusively in the form of agglutinative suffixes.

Kazakh has 7 cases. Case endings are applied only to the last element of a noun phrase—e.g., a noun, an adject, or a nominalised verb phrase. The endings outlined in the chart below are applied to a word ending in a front vowel, a word ending in a back vowel, a word ending in each of those with a voiced consonant, and a word ending with each of this and an unvoiced consonant. Note that the suffixes for the instrumental case do not follow vowel harmony—the vowel is a front vowel regardless of the other vowels in the word.

The declension of the pronouns is outlined in the following chart. Singular pronouns (with the exception of сіз, which used to be plural) exhibit irregularities, while plural pronouns don't. Irregular forms are highlighted in bold.

Declension of pronouns

Nom

мен

сен

сіз

ол

біз

сендер

сіздер

олар

Acc

мені

сені

сізді

оны

бізді

сендерді

сіздерді

оларды

Gen

менің

сенің

сіздің

оның

біздің

сендердің

сіздердің

олардың

Dat

маған

саған

сізге

оған

бізге

сендерге

сіздерге

оларға

Loc

менде

сенде

сізде

онда

бізде

сендерде

сіздерде

оларда

Abl

менен

сенен

сізден

онан

бізден

сендерден

сіздерден

олардан

Inst

менімен

сенімен

сізбен

онымен

бізбен

сендермен

сіздермен

олармен

In addition to the pronouns, there are several more sets of morphemes dealing with person.

Kazakh may express different combinations of tense, aspect, and mood through the use of various verbal morphology or through a system of auxiliary verbs, many of which might better be considered light verbs. For example, the (imperfect) present tense in Kazakh bears different aspectual information depending on whether basic present-tense morphology is used, or one of (commonly) four verbs is used:

Aspect in the Present Tense in Kazakh

Kazakh

Aspect

English translation

Жеймін

non-progressive

"I eat."

Жеп жатырмын

progressive

"I am eating [right now]."

Жеп отырмын

progressive/durative

"I am [sitting and] eating." / "I have been eating."

Жеп тұрмын

progressive/punctual

"I am [in the middle of] eating [this very minute]."

Жеп жүрмін

habitual/frequentative

"I eat [e.g., lunch at home every day]."

In addition to this aspectual distinction, Kazakh also exhibits a number of lexicalized pairs of varying converbs. For example, verbs of motion in Kazakh that are rendered in any kind of progressive tense are obligatorily realized with the helping verb жатыр, 'to lie', however the verb must take a unique participial form, -а/е/й. For example, "I am going [right now," would be rendered in Kazakh as мен бара жатырмын, and not *мен барып жатырмын.

^Some variations occur in the different regions where Kazakh is spoken, including outside Kazakhstan; e.g. ж / ج (where a Perso-Arabic script similar to the current Uyghur alphabet is used) is read [ʒ] in standard Kazakh, but [d͡ʒ] in some places.